PHP 5 Introduction to coding Tutorial

WELCOME TO PHP!

This tutorial will introduce you to PHP, a server-side scripting language you can use to make dynamic websites and web applications.

WHAT YOU SHOULD ALREADY

Before you continue you should have a basic understanding of the following:

HTML

CSS

JavaScript

WHAT IS PHP?

PHP is an acronym for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”

PHP is a widely-used, open source scripting language

PHP scripts are executed on the server

PHP is free to download and use

PHP is an amazing and popular language!It is powerful enough to be at the core of the biggest blogging system on the web (WordPress)! It is deep enough to run the largest social network (Facebook)! It is also easy enough to be a beginner’s first server side language!

WHAT IS A PHP FILE ?

PHP files can contain text, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP code

PHP code are executed on the server, and the result is returned to the browser as plain HTML

PHP files have extension “.php”

WHAT CAN PHP DO?

PHP can generate dynamic page content

PHP can create, open, read, write, delete, and close files on the server

PHP can collect form data

PHP can send and receive cookies

PHP can add, delete, modify data in your database

PHP can be used to control user-access

PHP can encrypt data

With PHP you are not limited to output HTML. You can output images, PDF files, and even Flash movies. You can also output any text, such as XHTML and XML.

WHY PHP?

PHP runs on various platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, etc.)

PHP is compatible with almost all servers used today (Apache, IIS, etc.)